This topic contains 15 replies, has 7 voices, and was last updated by jardinseducatifs 10 years, 4 months ago.
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Yes I put mine on top, & then mulch, wonderful. I liked it so much I did it twice.
& yes no dig to get them out either. Maybe next year I wont have the last years crop coming up again in strange places. My Charlottes are not strange shaped this year either.I need to bag mine!!
Thanks for sharing this: I find it fascinating how clean the tubers are at harvest time. On my dig/no dig experiment, same thing, parsnips and carrots are cleaner and easier to wash from the undug bed. And after rain, walking on surface compost does not make my boots as sticky as wet soil does.
Hi Charles.
Attempting to follow your method with spuds I planted them 10cm deep and created ridges by covering early growth with compost instead of earthing them up in the traditional way. I’m pleased to say that yields were good despite the fact that I never got round to watering them once – the compost seems to have locked enough moisture in the soil.
However I’m finding that as I harvest them I’m bringing up a lot of soil as well as the compost, effectively digging and therby losing the uniform layer of compost that I would like to plant subsequent crops into. Is there a way round this?
CP
Glad you had a good crop. Yes there is some soil mixing with compost although I find that most of the tubers pull out and I can find the rest by using a trowel to lever them out, after following their white stems from the main stem. Possibly you are being too vigorous as I would not call it digging. After harvest I walk on the bed to firm it all down again (except in last year’s rain).
Your Greenshaft peas sound a great success and show how peas like early summer warmth rather than midsummer heat, so it pays to start them early.
Today I resorted to scraping off as much of the surface 3 inches of compost covering my spuds with a trowel and then using a fork to DIG up my spuds.
We have had some rain and I had tried easing them out with the trowel again but to no avail. I think the problem is that at this time of year all the top growth has died off so there is nothing much left to pull on. Re-reading the above posts I also think that perhaps planting them 10cm might be too deep on my soil.
I’m resigning myself to growing the majority of them in the traditional way on a dug bed next year as I’m still not producing enough compost to cover all my beds and I don’t want to see what little I have being contaminated by soil yet again. I’ll also try a few just laid on the surface and covered with compost as suggested above.
I’ll let you all know how it goes – provided I’ve not been automatically kicked off the site for using the D-word that is!
CP
Interesting post!
You could try covering the thin layer of compost with black polythene and planting potatoes just into the surface soil, through holes in that. Potato plants are happy rooting into undug soil, for example I had a nice harvest this year with just 5cm compost on top of pasture, then either polythene or cardboard to keep light off tubers.
Thanks for the suggestion Charles – I’ve always been wary of using polythene fearing that it gives our slimey friends the ideal habitat to feed and multiply undisturbed. Do I need to do anything to prevent this or are my fears totally ungrounded?
Compostpope
Good point yet I find that when the polythene is laid at planting time, which you can do when soil is clear of weeds and has less slugs in for that reason too, there is only a small increase in slug numbers underneath it. Also I harvest as soon as tubers are developed, usually in July for second earlies, before slugs get busy!
Thanks for the reassurance, I’ll give it a go if I have enough compost still available.
Compostpope
Would a semi-permeable membrane be better than polythene?
CP
our version of this – we had run out of undug beds by potato planting time, but we had a big area that we’d mulched with rotting hay. the hay was 6-10″s thick. we stuck potatoes in the middle of the hay layer, and put a row of well-rotted manure on top of the line of potatoes.
our yield was enormous! the plants were huge too. we planted very late (may) due to the mad spring, and we have just had to lift them as they were starting to get blight. but you could tell the plants were otherwise still going strong – loads of tiny potatoes on the roots – so if we’d been able to plant earlier, so as to have more growing time before the blight, the yields would have been colossal.
we hadn’t even got round to earthing them up – next year we will try using hay for this.
and slugs? our garden is VERY sluggy but despite hay mulch being an obvious habitat for them, they didn’t do very much damage to the potatoes. most of the crop is good enough for selling, and we’ll enjoy eating the damaged ones. we did find 2 big toads nestled in the hay though, so it’s clearly a good habitat for slug predators too!
all in all, very pleased with a high yield for absolutely minimal effort
Ashleigh this is fantastic.
You know it and took the risk but for other readers who may not have tried this I want to add that in a damp summer this method carries slug risk, because they like damp hay and straw, but it has stayed too dry for them this year to be present near the surface.
Stay vigilant if it rains now as that can bring hungry slugs from seemingly nowhere.
Hi Nightgardener
The reason your soil stayed moist was because you had not dug and you mulched. Capillary action brings the water up from lower down in the ground. Where I have mulched the soil under the mulch is moist and I can push my finger into the ground, where I haven’t mulched the soil is dry and hard.
PeteI am planning a school project on pasture land being converted to veg growing.
My plan was to cut the turf of the 1m wide paths and put the sods onto the 1m wide beds, grass side down. Potatoes in a row down either side and a row of broad beans down the middle, covered with compost. At the same time, sow the path with clover. Earth up with grass clippings (or the clover) once or twice, harvest both crops before the summer holidays. Should be a cool project with a variety of seed potatoes provided by the agricultural research station nearby.
Do you think this would work?
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